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Shakespeare 
o ¢ 
Spiritual Life 


JOHN MASEFIELD 
Hon. D.Lirrt. 


The Romanes Lecture 
Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre 


4 June, 1924 


OX FORD 
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 


1924 


Oxford University Press 
London = Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen 
New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town 
Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai 


Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University 


Printed in England 


STfecherT. 


Po OG: 


= j 
Berndavm. 


; 
n 


Faalysh Weseare 


SHAKESPEARE AND SPIRITUAL 
LIFE 


Vick-CuanceLtor, Heads, Professors, and Members 
of this University, and you, Ladies and Gentlemen, who 
have come here to hear me, it is my task to-day to 
speak of Shakespeare and Spiritual Life. 

I have to speak this to the University, that is, to one 
of the great bodies of life which persists century after 
century, changing continually, yet remaining a unity ; 
making a bond among men, one of the subtlest and 
strongest bonds, of youth passed in brotherhood; linking 
the present to the past, and both to the future. The 
world moves as such bodies as this direct, whether to 
the trusting spirit, as in the past, or to the inquiring 
mind, as at the present time, or to the illuminated mind 
that shall be. I feel like this present minute addressing 
seven centuries. 

In the beginning let me say this: that by Spiritual 
Life I mean all imagined or apprehended Life which, 
without known, sensible, physical character, affects, or 
is imagined to affect, the lives of men and women in 
this world. I do not mean any way or rule of sanctity 
or austerity practised by devout persons of the great 
religions. 

* *K * * 


Man consists of body, mind, and imagination. His 
2844 A 2 


4866'7 


4 SHAKESPEARE AND 


body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagina- 
tion has made him remarkable. In some centuries, his 
imagination has made life on this planet an intense 
practice of all the lovelier energies. 

Imagination is controlling and using the energy of 
which we are made. Those who succeed in this have 
access, through their partial energies, to all energy. 
The thoughts of these men have the divinity of all 
energy: they do not die. 

Thought and image in these states of energy are one; 
together they make poetry; that mixture of idea with 
language which lives. 

Anything thought of with this energy becomes alive. 
When many think for centuries with this energy, about 
man’s utmost ideals, living thoughts of beauty and 
power take shape, are seen, and influence conduct. The 
imagined heaven 7s, here and now, a beauty and power. 


* *K *k * 


Great poets are not what is called ‘pioneers of 
thought’. Usually they come towards the end of 
a remarkable mood of this world, and are remarkable 
because they preserve any thought or enjoyment that 
that mood had. ‘They are great as that thought and 
enjoyment are great, since the life about them must 
necessarily be their foundation even if it be not their 


material. 
sk ae sf x 


All people use their imaginations when they think 
and enjoy. All, at such times, create living mental 


images according to their strength. The great poet 
gives intense life to the images in the mental world of 


SPIRITUAL LIFE $ 


his time. He makes bread out of the crop his world 
rows. 

S * +k “ *k 

If the intense thought and enjoyment of his time be 
in things which transcend this life of ours, as in times 
of belief in saints and devils, then the intense images 
of his work will be spiritual. 

Things are real or not, according to belief in them. 

o # * 


Body and mind, however erring, are intensely con- 
cerned in any act of imagination. Hand and mind 
make the moulds which the imagination presently 
overflows. 

x * xk x 

In the early sixteenth century, the imaginations of 
men overflowed the moulds of the world’s mind. 
Those moulds, both of Church and State, were broken. 
Both by knowledge and imagination, the world’s mind 
had grown bigger ; it needed a larger scheme in which 
it could believe. 

The half-century of the overflowing of the moulds 
was one of intense mental exaltation. Its chief result 
for us was the preparation of the ground for the coming 
of our great poet. 

xk x * xk 


Shakespeare was not trained for his life’s work by 
any institution. His problems were not solved for him. 
He picked up the food for his mind wherever he could 
find it: it was not found for him. Better still, it was 
not selected for him and forced into him. 

He was born of middle-class parents, in a house which 


6 SHAKESPEARE AND 


was neither fine nor poor, in a town of no great impor- 
tance, in a country-side not otherwise distinguished. 
There is lovely country near it; cattle pasture in the 
lowland and sheep pasture in the hills. Country life 
could be seen there at its best: farming, shepherding, 
and hunting. 

The amusements of the place, apart from the sports, 
were fairs. Sometimes a company of actors came there. 

The most beautiful work of art in the place was the 
parish church, which had been finished about fifty 
years before Shakespeare’s birth. Changes in religious — 
thought and in the fashions of art had no doubt made 
it seem old-fashioned and rather vulgar when Shakespeare 
was a boy. ‘The people who built it had gone: their 
outlook and beliefs were gone: it was all pre-Reforma- 
tion: it must have seemed old, barbarous: what 
Victorianism is to us. We all can teach our grand- 
mothers. 

I must say a few words about the England of that 
time. — 

England generally was sloughing the middle ages. 
The active and inquiring mind had questioned, chal- 
lenged, and overthrown the guidance and dominion of 
the Church. Rabelais had said, ‘Do what you will; do 
the thing you want to do’; and this was being done 
by great men everywhere. 

The land was self-supporting, though subject to years 
of scarcity. It was under-populated. The towns were 
small, and though, in some ways, they were filthier 
than our modern towns, the air was cleaner: men could 
walk from even the largest town into pleasant country 
in twenty minutes. 


SPIRITUAL LIFE - 


Work of a noble standard was being done in every 
way of mind and hand. Our coins were the loveliest 
in Europe. 

The laws were savage, but that did not matter: the 
race, being law-abiding, kept the laws. 

Pestilence visited the land each summer: sometimes 
terribly. 

The race was much what it is to-day; a kindly, 
humorous race of individuals, each cherishing some 
little or big personal queerness of interest or intellect, 
and therefore not working well together in institutions, 
but uniting in sport, and giving much (as individuals) 
to the common weal. Our institutions sometimes fail, 
our individuals save us. 

There was one great difference between Shakespeare’s 
England and ours. England then was an English 
country. It had not yet been governed by the Scotch ; 
the Welsh were rarities anywhere east of the Severn; 
the Irish were almost unknown. 

Those were the days of which tradition speaks, when 
it says that England was merrie. 


** * * * 


Shakespeare grew up in the heart of this English 
England. What did he learn as a child ? 

First, as to his religion. His father was a middle- 
class Protestant, who attended Church of England 
services as long as he could do so without fear of arrest 
for debt. His mother was a conforming Protestant with 
some Catholic relatives. Shakespeare was bred and 
remained a conforming Protestant: that is, there is no 
record of his being summoned for not going to church. 


8 SHAKESPEARE AND 


Next, as to his superstitions. He was born into a 
superstitious country society, at a time when the land 
was undrained, the roads unpaved, and the winter nights 
unlighted. From November till March travelling 
after dark was almost impossible. People sat by the 
fire and told stories of fairies, witches, and ghosts who 
then made darkness terrible all over the country-side. 

Besides these things, there were other things. If, 
like St. Withold, you ‘footed thrice the wold’, you 
were likely to meet the Night Mare and her ninefold. 
The wold was only three or four miles from Stratford, 
up Meon Hill: the Night Mare ran there with her 
ninefold. In that under-populated England the Night 
Mare and her ninefold had a wide range of pasture. It 
was a long way between churches. 


* *K * *K 


Next, as to the period in history which seemed 
romantic to him as a boy. This must always be a 
deciding element in the growth of a poet, especially of 
a poet like Shakespeare, whose main teaching came 
from popular tradition. 

To Shakespeare this romantic time was certainly the 
time of the later Wars of the Roses, when his great- 
grandfather served Henry VII. ‘There was some family 
tradition about this great-grandfather, who seems to 
have done the Lancastrians useful service, long since 


forgotten. 
2k sf x x 


Next, as to Shakespeare’s schooling. This was 
sufficient for his needs: a little more at that time might 
have warped his use of English, or made him ashamed 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 9 


of English practice. Like most geniuses, Shakespeare 
had a power of self-protection which excluded what 
did not serve the needs of his being. Knowledge was 
not the law of his being: he got as much as was good 
for him; no more. 

Lastly, as to what kindled him to poetry: I wish 
we knew. Plenty of books were in the world by the 
time he went to school: some good old English poets 
and other English poets who seemed good, being new. 
Besides the printed books, there was some spoken poetry 
in the world: there were ballad-singers, pot-poets, and 
touring companies of actors. I imagine that poetry 
was an interest and a delight to him before he left 
Stratford. 

x * 

Let me now run over these things very briefly, to 
see what they amounted to. They were the things 
which most influenced the growth of a great poet’s 
mind from without. 

Orthodox religion, whether as ritual or as dogma, 
seems to have meant almost nothing to him. 

His mental training on what we may call the 
masculine, or schoolmaster side, was also a slight thing 
to him. I think it gave him the feeling that dead flies 
had been put into the ointment of the apothecary. 

His mental training on what we may call the 
feminine, or old wives’ tale side, was always profoundly 
important to him: it made his intensest self. 

The memory of the country-side, the tradition of the 
great events of the past, which had led to marchings 
and violent deaths up and down the four counties best 


known to him, was much to him. 
2844 A 3 


IO SHAKESPEARE AND 


That is: Religion meant almost nothing to him, 
education little more, tradition a great deal more, and 
superstition very much indeed. 

These were the things brought to him by others. 
Let us now consider the aptitudes within himself. 

From the very first, he had an intense delight in the 
beauty of natural objects ; a love of flowers, of effects of 
light, of the flights and cries and songs of birds, of the 
colours, joys, and changes of the seasons; of the flavour 
that these things give to life, and of the intensity of 
joy that comes from being at one with such mysteries. 

Next, as he survived a Tudor childhood in a house 
where even the children would have had some share in 
the work, it is fair to suppose that he grew up to be a 
robust lad. Later on, even a few years later, the poems 
suggest that he lost this robustness, perhaps only for 
atime. But before he left Stratford, he was no doubt 
robust and took a wild young man’s share in all the 
sport of the country-side. All the energy that was 
afterwards turned inwards, was then turned outwards: 
all through his young manhood he was full of fun: very 
boisterous fun ; but his chief delight was hunting : all his 
early work shows how much the sights and excitements 
of hunting meant to his imagination. 

He had, therefore, intense zest for the beauty and 
the rush of life. On the top of these two zests, sex ran 
in him like a sea. 

These things together made up his equipment for the 
craft and mystery of poetry, whose kingdom is not 
altogether of this world. In this world, things went 
unluckily for the young man. He seems to have been 
trapped into an undesirable marriage, and to have been 


SPIRITUAL LIFE LI 


in question for poaching, if not for libel. He came to 
London, to make a fresh start. 


x * * * 


There is not a trace of spiritual life in the work with 
which he made his fresh start. On the contrary, his 
earliest work is full of temporal fashion. Very soon in 
his career he learned to indulge his will and to write 
out of what was strongest in him, his sense of country 
life and tradition. He trusted in that and in his own 
imaginative energy. 

He wrote easily and happily for at least ten years. 

His work in those ten years was matchless in comedy, 
in lyric, in variety and colour of character, and in 
grace and charm of spirit and verse. No such work 
had been done by any European: it was both new and 
lovely. It was the work of one too well content to 


watch 
beauty like a dial-hand 
Steal from his figure, 


to ask if the figure meant anything or what works 
might be behind the dial. 

Of definite religious belief, feeling, or opinion, there 
are, perhaps, a few barely discernible glimmers or rays, 
as of faintly awakened memory. One or two other 
glimmers show, perhaps, a sentimental sympathy with 
the idea of contemplation in seclusion. A saintly con- 
templative of no precise creed, who is yet empowered to 
marry people, appears in several plays. Besides this 
shadowy sympathy, there is a shadowy evidence of a 
dislike of Puritanism. If one adds to these things a 
fondness for rituals which could be made effective on 


12 SHAKESPEARE AND 


a stage, one has perhaps the measure of the young man’s 
religious feeling. 

His standard of conduct, however, is vety high: his 
sense of right and wrong is matchless: every age since 
him has felt this: one can give it no higher praise. It 
can be said of no other English writer. 

Jews, Pagans, and Christians were men to him; 
nothing more and no less: any least touch of religious 
bias in him would have blurred his vision of them. 


* € * *K 


Though he had little learning and less faith, he had 
much superstition. Such spiritual life as does appear in 
his early plays comes unchanged from popular super- 
stition. 

His ghosts are those of popular belief. They are 
usually the spirits of wronged or murdered men and 
women, who threaten and rouse up vengeance against 
their betrayers and killers. 

His fairies were of two kinds. Firstly, a minute 
kind described minutely in Romeo and Yuliet; and, 
secondly, a larger kind, big enough to appear upon the 
stage to pinch Falstaff and attend a fairy court in the 
wood near Athens. 

Of these two, I think that Shakespeare had seen only 
the minute kind. He saw them with great distinctness, 
and described them with detail in action, just as he saw 
them. He saw them perhaps only once. It was a 
bright moment worth recording. Having described 
them, he saw other more important things in action, 
and turned to describe them. As one of his admirers 
says, ‘He had the Phantsie very strong ’. 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 13 


The fairies which he saw in his imagination in the 
Midsummer Night's Dream are not those of popular 
English tradition. They are not wild enough, nor un- 
earthly and malicious enough. English, Welsh, and 
Scottish fairies terrify. A seer once said to me: ‘If a 
man tells you that he has seen the fairies, look if he be 
shaken. If he be not terrified, be sure that he has not 
seen.’ Shakespeare knew this very well. He took 
care to explain that his fairies were not those creatures 
who haunt at midnight by moonlight and are terrible, 
but shapes from India. 

Remember that many in his audience had seen 
fairies; those who: had, wanted no more of them 
Shakespeare gave them gracious romantic inventions, 
who speak charming verse about the weather. 

Apart from fairies, both in popular tradition and 
Shakespeare’s system, yet of fairy nature, and in some 
ways linked to fairies, is the solitary spirit of Puck or 
Robin Goodfellow, called good in propitiation. 

It is plain that Shakespeare liked to have an elvish 
boy in a play of his. There can be no doubt of that. 
It is also plain that there was in Shakespeare’s company 
of players a boy who did not grow any bigger. There 
may, of course, have been a succession of boys, and yet 
I do not think so. This boy seems to have been 
specially tiny and a most remarkable comic actor. The 
smallness and the comic talent coming together, as they 
do in several plays, give me the impression of a person. 
1 think that he played Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost, 
Puck in the Midsummer Night's Dream, Falstatt’s 
page, both in Hreury JY and in the Merry Wives of 
Windsor, Maria in Twelfth Night, the Player Queen 


14 SHAKESPEARE AND 


in Hamlet, Mamillius in the Wonter’s Tale, and 
Ariel in The Tempest. I think of him as a real and 
strange figure, who was important to the company 
throughout Shakespeare’s poetical life, and whose 
talents were often in Shakespeare’s mind when he began 
anew play. I daresay that the company looked upon 
him with tenderness, as a mascot. 

I am not going to strain the point any farther, 
because it is neither important nor very likely to be 
proved. It leads me to this further point, that when 
Shakespeare considered his own genius, he thought of it 
as an attendant boy-spirit. It is certain that in The 
Tempest he thought of his own genius as Ariel. In the 
late, irregular sonnet, number 126, he addresses this 
genius thus: 


O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power 
Dost hold Time’s fickle glass his sickle hour; 
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st 
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st: 
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, 

As thou goest onward still will pluck thee back, 
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill 
May ‘Time disgrace and wretched minutes kill. 
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure! 
She may detain but not still keep her treasure; 
Her audit, though delayed, answered must be, 
And her quietus is to render thee. 


In the great moments of his imaginings, whether in 
dream or vision, I do not doubt that that lovely boy 
did appear to him with some message which Time 
cannot kill. To the extraordinary man extraordinary 
things are done, which ordinary people call coincidences. 
They are not coincidences: they come from the 


SPIRITUAL, LIFE Is 


Helpers that attend all kindled imaginations. It 
behoves everybody to strive with the imagination, 
because only so do the Helpers come down into this 
earth ; where many are striving, many help. 


*K * *k * 


So much for the spiritual life in the early work. 

That work came out of the strongest elements in his 
nature, till those elements were so quarried and that 
nature was so changed, that they were no longer > 
strong. ‘There was a hesitation in the nature at this 
point in his career. He had written Henry JV, Parts I. 
and II, with all the strength of his sense of country 
life, of comedy and of history. ‘The plays had been 
deservedly great successes; they had made much 
money, and, according to the legend, the sayings and 
doings of Falstaff had won the virginal mind of Queen 
Elizabeth. 

On the wind or wings of this success Shakespeare 
wrote two plays which show that it was slack water 
with him. He had reached that age in the middle 
thirties which is said to be fatal to genius. Many 
geniuses, having come to an end of their development, 
do die at that time. Growth is the rare thing. Many 
men can be, and are, poets in their youth; but the 
many are common and do not grow; only the rare 
poet grows; and the growth of even the rarest poet 
may be capricious, may come in bursts between 
intervals of apparent death. ‘Those two plays, written 
at that critical age, are works of a skill so certain, that 
it has almost become a habit. Men going to them, even 
men who cared intensely for Shakespeare’s poetry, must 


16 SHAKESPEARE AND 


have felt, from seeing them, that the manner was harden- 
ing into a habit, that he was applying a method to his 
subjects, that his comedy was become formula and his 
lyric gone. He was not growing. 

Perhaps, over their beer, the exquisite ladies of the 
mansions at the back of the Strand talked of him, at 
that tide in his affairs, with pity, as a man of no real 
refinement spoiled by writing for people with no real 


taste. 
2 * * ** 


Now artists of all kinds exist and progress by 
destroying those selves of them which, having 
flowered, have served. They are continually sitting 
in judgement upon themselves, and annihilating their 
pasts by creating their opposites. ‘They know, better 
than any one, that they can only be saved if they are 
born again. They know that they must follow their 
formulae unless their excitement over some new idea be 
strong enough to burst a new channel. ‘The great 
writer is as unexpected as life, and follows no formula: 
his morrow is not as his yesterday, and his night may 
blaze with comets. 


*k *K K * 


Out of some such rebellion and annihilation came 
Twelfth Night. ‘There all the lovely, the lyrical, the 
golden in him overthrew all that was common, in- 
stinctive, and of the nature of habit. It was a new 
Shakespeare which no man could have foretold. 

But between Twelfth Night and the great tragedies 
there is an even greater gulf than between Twelfth 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 17 
Night and Henry FY. In his earlier plays he had seen 


the actions and passions of men and women whim- 
sically, fantastically, romantically, rhetorically, clearly, 
and intensely : now suddenly he saw them startlingly, 
and the difference is profound. 

Many of you here are writers who know the excite- 
ment of creative writing, and the sense of power which 
comes with the clear sight and full possession of the 
truth groped for, arrived at, mastered, proven, and now 
to be set down. You will know that that achievement 
and attainment is a peak or summit in life, a triumph 
of body and mind working flawlessly together, a piece 
of rhythm such as can only come rarely, when the 
sea and the boat and the boat’s crew are all in tune and 
time. Such achievement is a touching of the perfected 
self and an attainment of personal mastery; it is rare 
in life, being the excellence of life; but all who practise 
the arts have their good days, and many of you here 
have known it. 

But rarer than this, and more excellent, is another 
excitement which uses the other only as a ladder. 

All about the personality there is a wall or barrier of 
custom, work, memory, our conscious mind and the 
world’s, On the rare day, the golden day, a man can 
climb on the power of his excitement almost to the top 
of this wall, and look down upon himself and see his 
mind all spread out as a little garden, or little church, 
or little town, or little kingdom, according to his extent. 
But some men, on still rarer and more golden days, 
climb to the very top of the wall and do not look down, 
but look over, and see the nature of life which endures 
longer than dynasties or creeds: being the royalty 


18 SHAKESPEARE AND 


above kingship and the truth on which creeds are 
based. 


2 x ** * 


All life is an attempt to get beyond the barriers of 
self: some attempt it by drunkenness or devotion, some 
by love, drugs, danger, or the arts; others by one of 
the churches or by service: many attempt it blindly, 
many more under guidance which may be blind. They 
attempt it because they hope that beyond their own 
personal nature they may touch the nature of the 
world, | 

It was in Julius Caesar that he climbed from his 
instinctive and romantic self into the adventure of great 
poetry. 

No doubt, like all poets, at first, he saw no more in 
the fable than the opportunity for some big scenes: 
then, no doubt, he saw opportunities for the display of 
his own special powers, of being natural in the imagined 
scene and lyrical in the imagined passion. Plutarch 
gave him his subject simplified, and in a more gracious 
style than Holinshed ever compassed. The use of the 
theatre was second nature to him: he saw all things, 
even himself, in terms of drama. When he began to 
write, an excitement in the bigness and splendour of 
his subject made him see farther than he had seen 
hitherto; he began to see startlingly. 

Instantly, he saw old Rome, full of life, strong in its 
order, moving as though the wars and winter were over 
and spring come, with peace. Then instantly, with 
the speed and certainty of power, he saw men of no 
great importance, ordinary, good, stupid, sarcastic, 
usual men, gathering to kill the head of Rome, who 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 19 


kept that life and order going. He saw life in its 
essentials for what it is, an order of intense power, 
revolving with immense energy about a centre or axle, 
like a spinning-wheel. The spinning about that centre 
in his vision, as in truth, is the main business of it, 
ordained from of old from some divine source of rhythm 
and harmony; any upsetting of that spinning, from 
whatever motive, even the noblest motive that ever 
lured men to devilry, is devilish and from a hellish 
source of broken rhythm and disharmony. And at this 
point in his play he saw very clearly that outside this 
spinning world of spinning societies of fiercely whirling 
men, are powers or states of spirit who cannot act 
directly upon men, but who do not want the rhythm 
broken, and strive to keep it running and to save its 
threatened axle, by all sorts of promptings, inarticulate 
cryings, efforts which are misunderstood and warnings 
which are misinterpreted. These powers are of that 
heart of things against which the working brain of man 
is ever a barrier. Only in childhood, in the ecstasy of 
absorption, and in the illumination of power, can man 
apprehend them. 

In the effort of this great heart to make itself heard 
across that fence of steel, the wills of the plotters, 
a storm is roused in things subject to its power. 
Shakespeare in all this was following his fable closely, 
but seeing it startlingly, so that to us, as to him, the 
storm is the very thunder of the power of life, more 
true than any truth, more real than any reality known 
tous. In that storm which precedes or accompanies 
the great crime, the dead, whose wills are stilled, are 
drawn to walk from their graves, animals are shaken to 


20 SHAKESPEARE AND 


madness, voices cry in the air, all nature rings with 
warning which yet never reaches the threatened man, 
because it is Fated so. If it were not Fated, all that in- 
visible power and other protecting powers would fight 
unseen on Caesar’s side, bridling the plotters’ wills, 
parrying the plotters’ daggers, or blasting the plotters 
dead. 

When all the efforts of the invisible to avert the 
Fate have failed, the hour strikes, Caesar is killed. 
There follows a numbness upon the play, like Death 
itself. The will of the plotter is glutted, Caesar. is dead, 
and now it is seen that there was nothing in the 
plotters except the will to kill Caesar: now that that is 
done, they are no longer anything. Revolutionaries 
seldom are anything beyond the will to destroy. De- 
struction is always easy, and to violent and thoughtless 
people very pleasant. To make something is never 
easy, and to violent and thoughtless people it is always 
impossible. 

When the plotters have killed Caesar, they are made 
to realize that they have killed something vital to the 
world, which they cannot replace, and also that they 
have set going into the world a power of evil which 
can be released for blood, yet only appeased and chained 
by the blood of those who set it free. They are chased 
up and down the world until they are all gone, while 
Rome, the city which they had, as they supposed, ‘ set 
free’, spins again upon a new axle, much like the one 
they destroyed, quite as hard, but newer and likelier to 
endure. 

The play is spiritually true: that is, no time nor 
fashion of men can find it false: the nature of things 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 21 


acts thus; men act thus; great events come thus 
attended by spirits, happen thus with disharmony, and 
end thus when the world or the state has a new axle 
upon which it can turn. The play was a new kind of 
vision of all the old evidences of the scheme of things. 
Everybody had heard from childhood of warnings, 
crimes, ghosts, revenges, and retributions. They had 
been old wives’ tales and effective theatrical tricks to 
everybody. Shakespeare looked into the heart of them, 
till he saw how they come: out of the heart of the 
things of which we are members. 

The question how they come to be in the heart of 
things was also in his mind. He decided that they are 
in the heart of things because we think that they are, 
and that if we think burningly that a thing exists, that 
thing does exist, according to the intensity of our 
belief. ‘ Thinking makes it so.’ 

After this first great visionary play, Shakespeare 


wrote Hfamlet, which seems to be a questioning of | 


vision. In Fulius Caesar he had had profound visionary 
knowledge, attended with every ecstasy of power, of 
the spiritual nature of change in this world. The 
visitation of such ecstasy of power cannot but be a 
shaking experience, even to a man so infinitely greater 
than ourselves. For the time, I do not doubt that it 
seemed to Shakespeare a revelation of himself, the 
world, and the universe. » But almost at once, all that 
was of the Renaissance in him, all the inquiring mind 
in him, rose up to test that revelation. These portents, 
even when illuminated, even when made real by excite- 
ment, what are-they but superstition? These ghosts, 
however just their cries for vengeance, are no holier, 


f° ff 


2: SHAKESPEARE AND 


than men; they are as bloody and unmerciful as their 
killers, and far less holy than a fine man. 

In Hamlet he imagines one lit (as he had been) with 
visionary knowledge, yet setting up a standard of fine- 
ness of thought against that knowledge, as though, 
whatever the multitude may imagine, the fine mind is 
still a finer thing. All the Renaissance was based on 
that idea, and every church is against it. It is right ; 
it is lawful; to the fine mind it must in all ages be the 


chief law: 
neither is it lawful 
That he should stoop to any other law. 


But, lawful or not, it is not expedient to act with a 
fineness beyond the purpose of this world. Hamlet 
disobeys the orders given to him in vision ; he questions 
them; he thinks subtly ; he thinks, which in itself is a 
rebellion against destiny. Destiny is not altered, in 
this case, by the taking of thought: it is only made 
more tragical. Destiny is to be fulfilled by action, and 
in this case, in the end, is fulfilled by the sweeping 
away of the wicked man after he has destroyed the 
thinker. Destiny wins, yet the fine mind was right ; 
it was lovelier than Destiny. 

Three important plays follow this: they are plays of 
thought, not of vision. They are the difficult plays: 
Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Othello. 
Troilus is the bitterest and the strangest, and the other 
two the most skilful of all the plays. A great deal of 
ink and thought is spent to this day in writing upon all 
three; for which I refer you to the inker and the 
thinker. It is very hard to say what was in Shake- 
speare’s mind when he. wrote the three. Mainly, it 


SPIRITUAL LIFE oy 


seems to have been a brooding upon government. 
Having seen in Falius Caesar the horror of rebelling, 
he seems to have considered the lesser horror of being 
governed by the fool, the dupe, and the knave, and not 
rebelling. 

In Troilus and Cressida he seems to be defining what 
he loathed in life, in women and authority. In Measure 
for Measure he sees government, the most important of 
all things, being overset, in men and states, by desire 
coming with opportunity. Some ‘fantastical Duke of 
dark corners’ goes away, at the bidding of a fantasy, 
leaving Angelo with an angel’s power, which desire 
and opportunity make him use like a devil. In Othe//o 
government is in the hands of a credulous man, hated 
by a cunning man to whom chance gives opportunity 
after opportunity, till all that is lovely and generous is 
destroyed. His gift of lyrical excess was not with him 
when he wrote these plays; he seems to have been 
looking hard at life, with some disgust. 

When he had Raised Othello, he was forty years of 
age. He had written a great He) in many kinds of 
poetry, and for nearly two years had been more inter- 
ested in structure than in vision. What was it which 
made him suddenly and swiftly blaze out into a poetry 
unlike anything in the world? ‘There were lightnings 
of it in Fulius Caesar, but in Macbeth it flamed. 

We do not know why. Poets always do the best 
that they can at each time. Sometimes they fall below 
themselves, sometimes they rise above themselves. ‘ Oft 
he seems to hide his face, but unexpectedly returns.’ 
We do not know why the Macbeth year was more 
glorious than any other. We can only suppose that all 


24 SHAKESPEARE AND 


prospered: a magnificent fable came at the magnificent 
moment ; but sometl®ng more, perhaps, came. It may 
be that King James I, who, like his mother, grandfather, 
and great-grandfather, cared deeply for poetry and had 
himself written enough to understand when he was in 
the presence of a great poet, gave a magnificent and 
wise encouragement. Some one is said to say (it is the 
sort of thing that some one would say) ‘ that the greatest 
artist is he who is most helped’. It is true. Great art 
does not proceed from a great criticism, but from great 
encouragement. The great mind being given his 
opportunity, does great things, and it is from these that 
criticism derives such principles as it has. The great 
times of art are those when power has the intelligence 
to encourage it. 

Whatever main cause prompted Shakespeare, all other 
things, such as health, business, the people, the events 
of daily life, the weather, and some such happy state of 
national excitement as the settlement of the crown 
upon James, must have helped his work. In the 
tumult of creation and the calm of vision he saw once 
more the workings of spirits in human life. The 
vision is like that in which he saw Julius Caesar, but 
it is very much more intense. 

In Julius Caesar he had seen powers outside human 
life trying to influence men for their good. In Hameet, 
which is a distrusting of all such power, he had felt that 
promptings of the mind, especially those of the deeper 
mind, urging to caution, may be finer and wiser as 
guides to conduct. In Macbeth he saw powers (outside 
human life, and unable to act directly upon men) who 
want the rhythm of life broken, and strive to break it by 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 25 


promptings, by inarticulate cryings which are misunder- 
stood and prophecies which are misinterpreted. He saw 
these powers as parts of a devilish will in things, against 
which all that is upright in the soul of man is ever a 
barrier. 

In the effort of this devilish will to make itself heard 
across all that is good in the heart of Macbeth, a storm 
is roused in things subject to its power: all nature rings 
with warning, which touches neither the tempted nor 
the threatened man, because it is Fated so; because the 
devilish will is, for the moment, too strong. 

When the efforts of the devilish will have triumphed, 
the hour strikes, Duncan is killed. At once it is seen 
that there was nothing in Macbeth or his wife except 
the will to be King and Queen: now that that will is 
glutted, they are no more King and Queen than they 
were, they are two traitors trying to protect themselves 
by blood. ‘They have set free into the world those 
leopards of blood which can only be chained by the 
blood of those who freed them. 3 

All this is set forth with the utmost haunting magical 
power. All feel that power; but to a writer, to one, 
that is, who knows that what was set down (even by 
Shakespeare’s power) was only one-third of what was 
seen, this poetry is overwhelming. Even in cold print 
the words are marvellous. When they are spoken, 
when they are given their value from a mind and their 
barb from a voice, they overcome. No man can hear 
them without knowing that Shakespeare as he wrote was 
at the heart of life, in that rush and exaltation of ecstatic 
order which scientists now proclaim. In the tranquillity 
of that energy, a thought not only took shape, it took 


26 SHAKESPEARE AND 


presence and passion; blinding presence, overwhelming 
passion: virtues were pleading like angels, trumpet- 
tongued ; pity, like a naked new-born babe, was striding 
the blast, and heaven’s cherubim were horsed 


Upon the sightless couriers of the air. 


I say that he touched the heart of life. In that 
mood, which was perhaps brief, perhaps only the half 
of one day (for I have no doubt that at least half of 
Macbeth was written at a sitting), his mind became pure 
energy and its thoughts partook of the nature of pure © 
energy: they became indestructible. ‘They are real, 
while Shakespeare is dust. Intense thought is the only 

| reality. A church is only the testimony of many that 
this is true. 

He did not quite reach this intensity again (even in 
King Lear), though his mind lived among glorious and 
lovely things until the end. At the very end, he con- 
sidered the whole matter profoundly in his play of The 
Tempest. ‘There he considers the Renaissance mind 
with the misgiving which comes to all who see the 
individual intellect soaring far beyond the social struc- 
ture of its time. ‘That misgiving is shared by all who 
carry on that Renaissance, of free inquiry, among our- 
selves. The attainment of intellectual power, being a 
life-work in itself; takes the man who should be the 
ruler from his government: he is thereupon deposed 
by the knavish and the greedy, and cast out among the 
brutish: unless he can bend spirits to his aid, this world 
will be no safe place for his daughter. 

He frees an imprisoned Helper, who works for him 
in the shapes of the elemental and intellectual powers, 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 27 


until the brutish is disciplined and the knavish have 
restored the power usurped. 

No doubt the ‘lovely boy ’, Ariel, was a real presence 
in Shakespeare’s mind: one who had come there for 
many years, in many shapes, with help of many 
kinds, but was now craving to be gone. What was 
Sycorax, who could imprison this spirit for twelve 
years in a cleft pine-tree ? 

What was the spirit who could be so imprisoned ? 
He brought into life all that Prospero willed, yet longed 
for life of his own. 

Perhaps that is what happens to the thing intensely 
imagined : it demands what the men of the Renaissance 
demanded, leave to be themselves and to do what they 
wanted to do. 

*k * x * 

In the last act of this play Prospero reckons up the 
spiritual life that obeys him and the spiritual powers 
that it has helped him to attain. The spiritual life is 
that of popular superstition : the elves, the sea-chasers 
and demi-puppets ; the spiritual powers are those of the 
mind of energy in the moment of energy becoming one 
with energy. z i 

In this poem, Shakespeare considered man himself as 
an imagination. 

We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of. 


It is profoundly true. We are now what men imagined. 
More than that, we are miraculous substance which 
Energy is using to make these dreams, these theatres, 
these cities and marvels of men. 


28 SHAKESPEARE AND 


Yet even if a man become one with that energy and 
make dreams and imaginations out of this miraculous 
substance, it is but for a time: 


Her audit, though delayed, answered must be. 


The attendant spirit craves freedom, the artist loses the 
wish, if not the power, to charm, and the eye grows 
tired of the book. What remains for Prospero when 
he comes to want 


Spirits to enforce, art to enchant? 
* My ending’, he says: 


My ending is despair, 

Unless I be relieved by prayer, 
Which pierces so that it assaults 
Mercy itself; and frees all faults. 


That last line has been quoted as evidence of Shake- 
speare’s orthodoxy in religious matters; but I think 
wrongly. The line brings into my mind the image that 
it sprang from in Shakespeare’s, some throned and 
lovely and benign Mercy, such as one of the great men of 
the Renaissance would have painted or carved. Mercy 
itself: no living thing. But I see a great and lovely 
figure, beyond all sex, throned somewhere and crowned, 
to whom the sharp prayer might pierce. Surely, if 
thought can reach to any such divine calm and gentle 
image, the faults of that mind are freed. He who had 
touched ideal form by thought could touch ideal quality 


b id 
aT a x 2k sf 


Some have written to prove that Shakespeare was a 
religious man. Others have written to prove that 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 29 


among other things he was drunk, mad, a thief, illiterate, 
Welsh, Scotch, Irish, Italian, French, German, Bacon, 
Essex, Oxford, a soldier, a sailor, a lawyer, a butcher, 
and a schoolmaster. I believe that he was an English 
poet of a great and beautiful mind, who held to no reli- 
gion save that of humanity and his own great nature. 

The great men of his time were not men of religion, 
though religion had done its work in them. — Shake- 
speare’s age was religious, in its own way, which was 
not any way of fullness of life, giving all to build and 
beautify a church, either of souls or of stones. His age 
was not building churches (I do not remember to have 
seen one built in his time): it was preparing to smash 
churches and put up conventicles where one could hate 
one’s neighbour as oneself. 

It was an age indulging and beginning to repent its 
indulgence of the will and mind. To the cultured it 
was an age of belief in past ages: to Shakespeare, 
who had no culture, it was an age of belief in himself. 
He was like poor beauty in his sonnet: he did not 


indirectly seek 
Roses of shadow, 


since his own rose was truth itself. 


*K * * * 


There is another way to truth: by the minute 
examination of facts. ‘That is the way of the scientist : 
a hard and noble and thankless way. It is not the way 
of the great poet, the rare unreasonable who comes once 
in ten generations. He apprehends truth by power: 


30 SHAKESPEARE AND 


the truth which he apprehends cannot be denied, save 
by greater power, and there is no greater power. 
xk x x xk 

/ All things are in the mind of the great poet in the 
‘moment of his power, because he touches energy, the 
source of all things, the reality behind all appearance. 
In the moment of his power he is made one with 
Nature: his being is completed and his work perfected 
by the force of life itself. 

One other thing is true. 

The effort to truth, beauty, and understanding i is the 
strength of any age of men. 

Seven, six, five, even four centuries ago, men put all 
their efforts towards truth, beauty, and understanding 
into their churches, which were at last made perfect. 
Then the great minds turned from the churches and 
exalted man whose mind had made every church. 
They realized that man is the real miracle because he 
can question the miracle. Man has questioned the 
miracle ever since, and found it daily more miraculous. 

Shakespeare and his fellows exalted the miracle of 
man, whose passionate will marches like Tamburlaine, 
who was lame, yet conquered the world, and whose 
questioning mind probes like Hamlet, who was killed, 
yet was righter than Destiny. His statement is that of 
a company of complete men, who needed no guidance, 
but wielded power from within themselves, and were 
themselves invisible like the sun. 

His strength is the strength of that time: he is the 
bread of that crop of men, whose delight was all pas- 
sionate nature and whose art was therefore all passionate 
portraiture or passionate contest. Of spiritual religious 


SPIRITUAL LIFE 31 


belief those pagans had hardly a trace: it made no part 
in their thought and enjoyment; you may therefore 
look in vain for it in Shakespeare, who did but make 
bread out of the corn they supplied. Of superstitious 
beliefs those pagans had many. Sometimes in his 
greatest moments these became luminous in Shakespeare’s 
mind. ‘The life which his imagination then gave them 
makes them alive for us: they are still spiritual forces 
influencing the world. 
x ** x x 

It is belief that makes a thing: it need not be a fine 
belief: a coarse and strong belief is more likely to 
endure: that is why superstitions outlast creeds. Shake- 
speare had many superstitions, but his belief was in 
himself: out of that self he made his system, which 
moves us all profoundly, whatever creeds we profess. 
In that system man is warned, like Caesar, but follows 
his own Fate; he is tempted, like Macbeth, but is misled 
by his own heart; he is ordered, like Hamlet, but acts 
by his own wisdom. He is ruined by his own generosity, 
like Lear or Timon: he loves much and is little for- 
given, like Antony: he is of a passionate credulity, like 
Othello: but in all these shapes man lives and dies by 
what is strongest in himself. Only in the last of the 
plays is there a spirit of beauty, and that spirit is not 
served by the artist, but serves the artist, and is kept to 
service only by the artist’s will. 

x . * x 

And at the end of it all, Shakespeare was a sick old 
man on a bed, hoping that men would leave his bones 
in peace, and tempering prayer with curse in his appeal 
to them to spare them. Then they wrapped him in 


32 SHAKESPEARE AND SPIRITUAL LIFE 


a shroud and laid him in Stratford Church, where he 
lies quiet enough that once shook so with his sense of 
the glories of being man. ‘My spirit’, he wrote once, 
when he was a man in love: . 

My spirit is thine, the better part of me. 


His spirit is ours, or would be, if we cared enough. 
The images of his belief walk the world still like the 
only realities. They are the imaginations of the poet, 
in a way nothing but dreams, and in another way the 
rock which endures when the crown has fallen and the 
creed ceased and the race become a memory. 


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